


Hush

by Vigils



Category: Death Stranding (Video Games)
Genre: Bone Breaking, Chiral Impotence, F/M, Hate Sex, Revenge Sex, Ryona, Vaginal Fisting, Vomiting, everything is black goo, taking some liberties with the lore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:54:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21677080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vigils/pseuds/Vigils
Summary: Higgs offered her a proposition. Fragile chose wrong.
Relationships: Higgs Monaghan/Fragile
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	Hush

For what felt like hours she careened along an unseen path, her world reduced to a tiny black nothing that smashed her body to blisters and filled her ears with the roaring of blood. Her lungs felt squeezed as the air ran out. God, that she’d never wasted her breath to scream…

 _A container._ Barely bigger than a crib and yet they’d stuffed her into it like cargo—like _junk_ —to be jostled along at the mercy of her transporter. Sometimes she swore he was shaking it, just to mess with her, but maybe he’d just… No, it was hard to imagine Higgs stumbling. He hadn’t messed up a single thing, after all. Not in catching her with the nuke. Not in the _proposition_ he’d fabricated right down to her specs… All a trap anyways.

She’d chosen to jump, and she’d been punished for it.

Higgs had done something. Shut her off from her Beach. His DOOMS level was way higher than hers, higher even than she’d caught on, and just like that, she’d never had a choice to begin with. He’d broken her umbrella in two over his knee. Now he was breaking her body inside a tiny metal case.

The container gave a violent rattle and the top of her skull raked across the bolts lining the inside. A muffled scream tumbled from her throat until she bit down on her tongue and pulled herself together. There wasn’t air to waste. 

The hiss of timefall on the metal casing kept her counting time. How long til it rusted through and it’d be her skin hissing as years were melted away? God, how long? She felt like a packing crate being folded and crushed to his liking. She felt like she was about to break.

Then all at once the jouncing of her dark little world stopped. The drum of rain on her box had stopped too. She couldn’t hear anything now. That was almost worse.

Then there was a deafening crack, a barrage of light, and her body tumbled sideways onto a hard, bumpy surface. For a second she remained half-frozen in foetal position, joints locked and bloodless—then feeling rushed back in all at once. Tears flashed in her eyes as a low groan ripped from her throat. _Fuck._ Now he’d had that satisfaction. Where was he?

Turning her head as much as she was able, Fragile scanned her surroundings for her deliverer. Damp rock walls domed overhead, the ground beneath slick stone and dirt and moss. The back of the cave yawned like a maw. She turned fully, to face the cave’s mouth, and saw the hooded figure of Higgs standing backlit against the still-bright sky.

“How’d ya find the trip, Fragile?” came the voice from behind the mask. “Anything broken yet?”

Instinct flared—once again, she chose to jump.

Her mind flashed. Her muscles jarred, like a short-circuit. A crackle of chiral energy flickered and died.

Higgs started to laugh, and it sounded fake. 

“Dear me,” he crooned. “In a hurry to leave? But we just got here…”

Suddenly hyper-aware of her exposure, Fragile shivered and stumbled to her feet. Unbalanced. Feeble. She felt like a newborn, ripped out into a world that blinded with its coldness, dumped onto a filthy delivery bed that would also serve as her grave.

Unless she could help it.

Enough feeling had soaked back into her muscles by the time Higgs walked towards her that she managed to back up without falling, putting a cave wall behind her and fumbling for a hold on a loose rock. It felt solid, secure. Just light enough to lift with one hand. She fought to keep her face steady, betraying nothing.

Higgs had the advantage over her on that front too, of course. Through his golden death mask and the timefall-proof hood underneath, she saw only a glimpse of his eyes, baby blue, rims kohl-stained. They crinkled coldly as he stood over her, the cyan light from his dormant BB pod winking in synchrony. 

“Look, I know the locale ain’t ideal,” he drawled. Had his voice always grated this much? “I would have booked us a private room, but the issue with them is… well, they tend not to be so private. You know what I mean?”

“Get on with it,” Fragile snarled up at him. Her feet felt leaden, pulpy, as her blood remembered how to flow and found the roadblocks of fresh blisters in its way… Running would be a fool’s move now, especially with the rain. She had to jump… But if even Higgs wasn’t doing that either, who knew what he’d done…

He put an arm on the cave wall beside her. “All right. Let’s recap. Starting from where you chose to jump and settled for being… _damaged goods_.” His mask muffled a chuckle and left his voice husky. “So, ready to finally take some damage, Fragile? How about we start with these…?”

A glove plucked the sweat-sodden hem of her vest. Higgs only laughed again as she scurried away, putting as much space as she could between him and her stripped, vulnerable body while keeping her weapon concealed—the laugh sounded real this time, though.

“Why you didn’t take the goods and run when you had the chance is beyond me. Woulda been a sight to see, too, you hauling your flat little ass through the rain with a live nuke in your arms! I only got one question.” He spread his arms, leaning toward her across the distance. “Why’d you have to go ruin the show?”

“I didn’t ruin anything for you, asshole,” Fragile spat back at him. “You wanted me to jump. You just needed me to leave you your little toy. Levelling South Knot, _that_ was your big plan.” She tested her grip around the rock hidden in her fist as salt trickled down her lips. “Why this game?”

“Oh, sweetheart…” He sounded… off. Head cocked. Eyes narrowing under his mask and the other mask and the shadow of the hood. So many layers of deception.

Her own shock was soon writ naked on her face.

“The nuke was a dud,” said Higgs.

“What…?”

God, her voice sounded pathetic. Brittle. Far away all of a sudden as the full weight of her foolishness converged in the hollow pocket of the cave and her vision tunnelled onto the metallic leer in the darkness ahead of her—the golden grin and nothing else.

He stepped toward her again, and with the cave mouth at her back, the timefall sheeting down, she had nowhere else to go.

“I knew you wouldn’t let me get my kicks with the same trick twice in a row—you’re too much of a tight bitch for that. But I gotta say… I didn’t expect _this._ ” His voice crackled out into a laugh as she _felt_ , rather than saw, his gaze roaming over the stripped and bruised body now in arm’s reach: sweat-stained underwear, taut limbs. She felt sick.

When he leaned in close, the sharp chiral whiff of his breath prickled her cheek through the layers. “But maybe I shoulda seen it coming, hm? Maybe… you _wanted_ to be caught.”

He put his hand between her legs.

A muscle twitched. Higgs flinched too, but too late—Fragile swung her fist up into his face and crunched stone into metal, the rock connecting with enough force to knock the mask clear off his jaw. He didn’t even grunt, just staggered back, and seizing her chance she shoved him away with as much force as she could muster, then turned on her heel and made for the cave entrance. Her feet seethed in protest as the fresh blisters pulsed, but maybe she’d bought herself enough time—just enough—just maybe—

The timefall was letting up! He was off guard, then, his power down for now. She kept running. Shut her eyes. Tried to see her Beach. Focused on the safehouse she’d rested in last. Felt the chiral energy thrum and crackle through her—

Which was when the pain exploded in her ankle. Vision sparked from black to white and back again, as the pinpoint of heat spread and engulfed her foot and calf. It took her a few seconds to realise that the blank noise in her ears was her own scream.

She was also on the ground. The world windmilled and righted itself, offering her a lopsided view of her sorry fate: her left leg splayed useless, blood streaming over her foot. The ankle was half gone, blasted into a fleshy crater with shattered bone at its core.

“What did you do?!” she shrieked as Higgs came at her. “What did you _do?!”_

The only response was the mechanical whirr of his odradek folding itself away, and his glove reaching down for a fistful of her cropped hair. 

He took hold and pulled. She had no choice—she crawled after him, forced to follow the lead of his hand on all fours so her scalp wasn’t ripped clean off. Not just letting him drag her but damn well dragging herself. _Fuck you. Fuck you to hell!_ She wanted to yell, to fight, but she knew there was no point, she couldn’t jump, she couldn’t even run, and behind her, the ruins of her blasted ankle painted a _Do Not Cross_ line across the ground: a cardinal warning, if there’d been anyone to heed it. Anyone but her, and _him._

Higgs flung her down in the moist shadows of the inner cave.

“Now, listen here,” he said, a little ragged, one finger wagging in the air like the warning sensor on an odradek. “ _You_ decided to jump. _You_ made that choice. Not only once but—damn—twice in a row! I mean…” His laugh distorted as he knelt down and she had to fight the urge to cringe back, one of his hands slapping down onto her leg—the uninjured one, thank god. She was still reeling in agony. “I think it’s high time you learned not to start things you ain’t gonna finish. What do you say?”

The other hand hooked under his mask and, with some muffled grunts of what she assumed—what she hoped—was at least a little bit of pain, pulled the rubber sheath away. She was gratified to see the lining momentarily stick to his thin lips, shreds of skin and black blood peeling off from where her swing had smashed his mouth. Not so pretty, that. He grinned regardless—or grimaced—gingerly swiping his tongue across the tar coating his teeth: imperfections on an otherwise perfect smile.

“I said…” He raised an eyebrow etched out in golden ink. “What do you say?”

Fragile’s gaze slipped away as she thought of the stint with the nuke. How she’d risked it all to stop it, then discarded it at the first sign of an out. How she’d failed to fight the thugs stuffing her into that container. How, maybe, she’d never been sure what she was starting, what she was doing, what was right…

And wasn’t she paying for that indecision now?

She said nothing.

A hand shot out and grabbed her jaw, one thumb sliding leathery-smooth synthetic across her lower lip, gold metal overlays prying it open. “Nope, still got your tongue, I see. So what, you still playing hard to get? Come on, Fragile, there’s no one here but you and me.” Thin lips pouted. “And ‘less the rain lets up, it’s gonna be you and me for a _loooong_ while.”

She spat in his face.

For the second that the thin, dehydrated bullet of spit ran down his cheek, Higgs actually had the decency to look shocked. It faded after a moment, though, replaced with something worse. Something she couldn’t place. “Now that’s just not polite.”

He squeezed her jaw harder, forcing it down until her mouth was an open basin of delicate flesh and fragile teeth, and suddenly she was afraid, and she grabbed at his wrist and pulled, scratching feebly at the glove and serving only to make his finger and thumb cinch tighter. She didn’t notice him hawking until the thick tarry mass shot wetly onto her tongue and down her waiting throat. He slammed her teeth shut.

“Swallow, bitch.”

She closed her eyes, and did, and tried to imagine it was just her own. Her own did not taste like blood and acid. 

That was what flooded her senses, though, when he mashed his lips over hers in what was less of a kiss than a sloppy, artless assault on her decency that nonetheless left her whimpering, protests muffled into his teeth. It was disgusting—not only the taste but the way his tongue lashed around like some starving entity unto itself. She caved, shoving her hands against his face until he was forced to pull back. When he did the saliva strung between their lips. Water mixed with oil.

His eyes were practically sparkling as he thumbed the trail of gunk from his chin. 

“I’m gonna crack that frigid shell of yours, believe me, I am.”

Frigid, was it? She scoffed, but it turned into a dry retch halfway, less out of disgust than a sickening pulse of heat from the deep, intense ache now nesting in her ankle. So all of this… it wasn’t simply her punishment for stopping a nuke that was a dud all along anyway. It was retribution for not slavering at his heels while they were under a professional contract… She couldn’t have made it up, but she couldn’t find it in her to laugh either.

“In your dreams,” she croaked instead.

Higgs tutted, then stood. Feebly, Fragile clasped her hands around her shin, shielding the site of the damage… like she could protect herself worth a damn right now.

He simply brought his boot down on her other leg. _Hard._ The uninjured one—now pinioned under the crush of synthetic rubber grinding into unbroken skin. She yelped, pushed at his boot, beat at his shin, but he just laughed.

Bent at the waist, like a dapper bow.

Locked her elbow into place, grabbed her hand, and _pushed._

Curious how delicate the human frame truly is. One sharp, little _push_ , that was truly all it took to snap her wrist bone in two.

She stared, shattered by shock. Letting go only of her now useless hand, Higgs kept hold of her elbow and used it to lever the mangled trophy of her limb, turning it this way and that so they could both observe the joint lolling and rolling like a ragdoll’s. Like a broken marionette’s.

He smirked, pleased, and moved to her other arm.

“No no _no, please, NO!”_ It was the first time she begged. Neither that nor the kicks from her whole leg were enough to stop him as he savagely twisted and braced.

“It’s all right, darlin’, just a little _break._ See?”

 _SNAP._ The sound was swallowed by the cave walls, but there was no ignoring the pain reverberating through her nervous system.

Then she really was sick. Let the bile tear out of her without a final thought to how vulnerable and unseemly this might make her look under regular circumstances. What was the meaning of decency now? She was far away from anyone who’d really care.

She was hobbled in a cave with a madman who wanted to see her fall apart. And he was already getting what he wanted.

“Guess you break easy after all,” Higgs mused, and let both of her crippled limbs drop.

For a few precious moments, she simply lay there on the damp rock trying to process the agony assaulting her mind. It wasn’t something you could measure on a radar. Her systems would be fritzed if it was, she thought in a moment of quasi-clarity, grasping to link the insanity of this moment, this day, to something familiar, if lightyears away right now—the alarms would be flashing red and yellow across the HUD until she could ignore the danger no longer. There were no such colours here. Only Higgs’ pacing, a black and gold lion playing with his prey.

He started to whistle. Either the cunt was tone deaf or not even music was making sense anymore.

Peeling off his gloves finger by finger, the man tossed them aside and popped the joints in his hands, looking down at his shiny, newly arranged toy with something like the twinkle of creation in his eye. 

Fragile stared back at him, cradling her arms over her chest. How she wished it was a nuke nestled there. A real one. At least she’d take him with her.

Oblivious to her fantasies, Higgs knelt down to ostensibly indulge his own. His hands were cold when they shoved the stained cami up over her tits. Not as cold as his stare, though—no amount of gold ink or kohl could warm that truth up. Shudders that were wholly unlike shudders of pleasure trickled through her as her already-hard nipples were scoured by a calloused thumbpad, then pulled and twisted ‘til she was forced to stopper a squeal on the flesh of her forearm. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. Not again. Not that it was an easy promise to keep when she looked down and saw one breast stretched and bloodless between his teeth, like he was ready to tear it off. The other was grappled in a claw-grip, pushed against her chest to fashion a cleavage where none had been before. There was a sharp pinch. A drop of blood trickled from his lips. 

She opened her mouth. Squeezed it shut again. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t.

_Just give him what he wants. Just don’t break._

So instead she raised her ribcage and pushed harder against his mouth—like she was enjoying it—like she was asking for more—as the ghost of a moan escaped her lips.

It was an illusion Higgs fell for. With a sick _pop_ he released her flesh and kissed his handiwork goodnight—a cruel halo of blood-beaded bruising stamped around one nipple—before returning his attention to her mouth.

“I knew you were a cold bitch but I didn’t think you were a freak,” he hummed. She still tasted of vomit but the way his lips supped at hers, you would have been forgiven for forgetting it.

She turned her head so his graceless kisses fell into her neck instead. “I’m in good company then,” she rasped.

He snickered—“sure are”—and nipped the skin of her throat. Her thighs instinctively clamped as he stuck a hand between them again, this time with purpose. Too late.

“Damn, blondie… you into pissing yourself too, or is all this for me?”

 _“Fuck…”_ Heat flooded her face, but she still had the presence of mind to force her muscles limp. Pliant. Even with his palm curiously kneading at the thin, damp barrier of her panties, this was yet another moment in which she desperately wanted to laugh, but for the life or death of her, couldn’t.

“Oh—!” Higgs knelt back and pulled a sheepish face. To make matters worse, she’d let herself be tricked by a fucking awful actor. “Dang, I almost forgot.”

With a hydraulic sigh, the umbilical cord hooking him up to his blacked-out Bridge Baby came untethered, and he placed the pod on the ground an arm’s distance away. He was gentle with it, but only because the equipment was precious, she knew. Taking off his cape and laying it over the pod so it obscured it completely wasn’t a gesture of consideration for the tiny life. Higgs didn’t see that thing as having any more human value than herself. Just cargo. Goods to be used and discarded.

Still, he loved a charade. “Don’t scream now. You’ll wake the baby.”

Then he put two fingers to his lips, wet them, and jabbed them straight into her cunt.

It wasn’t a scream but a strangled gasp of pain that brought that shit-eating grin back onto his face. Lubrication obviously wasn’t the issue. Still her flesh strained and resisted for a second, two, before treacherously yielding and swallowing him down to the knuckles.

She quivered, tightened. She hadn’t expected to be fighting a battle with her own body, it beaten and broken and thrice crippled, and still find herself losing.

Bastard knew this was nothing but a teaser just as well as she did, though. But this hadn’t happened in a long time, she was as good as a virgin by now, and even with the deathly chill of his hands, the delicate sheath of her cunt already felt like it was burning, already splitting apart, soft flesh bruising as his knuckles rammed against her.

“ _Fuck,_ stop…!”

Who was she kidding? He’d barely started.

The fingers curled inside, making a pincer with the thumb mashing down on her clit, making her eyes roll and muscles tighten and her bare belly cinch from sudden overstimulation. Her bloodied heel dragged on the ground. The nerves there were blasted to shit anyway. Wasn’t the pain better than the admittance of pleasure?

“Now you’re crackin’,” said Higgs, like he could read her mind.

“I… am not…” she whimpered back, even as she twitched on his strings.

“No?”

“No,” she said, and “no,” again. But the denials were getting weaker. She could hear it for herself.

His free hand squeezed her jaw again and forced her gaze back to his face, so he could watch hers crumple as he shoved a third finger inside and started to gouge into her in earnest. So she got a faceful of his toothy sneer as he dragged his fingers out and then rammed them back in again, raking through her with a savagery that left her muffling groans into his mouth for lack of a better place. So his chuckle vibrated through her from brain to core.

“Oh, Fragile, I know…” The way he said her name made it sound like it wasn’t a name, just a word, lowercase, a _thing_ to be tossed around. “So hard to accept you’re breaking when truth is you’re already broken.”

When he stuck his thumb in there for good measure she knew she was really splitting. And she was doing nothing but opening her legs wider and swallowing more moans. It was Higgs who was tearing her apart sweetly. Forcing more and more parts of himself into her until her own self began to dribble away.

No… ‘she’ was gone, replaced with the words he so lovingly, generously bestowed upon her cracking shell. “Tight.” … “Hot.” … “Wet.” 

“The perfect little slut.”

It hurt more than her broken bones or her shattered ankle. They would heal in time, even if they had to fix themselves.

Was it because she knew what that hand was capable of? Blasting her apart from the inside out if it pleased him?

Or because she knew he was right.

The needy grip of her thighs around his wrist was proof enough of that, as was the brittle sound her throat made when he popped his hand out of her.

For a moment he admired the raw, sopping crater he’d fashioned. Apparently he was satisfied with how it looked now, and with whatever expression it was that passed over her face as her body tried to adjust to the loss… and with the fact that when he dragged his fingertips gently through her folds, over her now-engorged and pulsing clit, it felt like mercy. Like benevolence. Like relief that made her eyes flutter closed and her mouth part in something all too much like _want._

What a perfect little toy she was. A broken doll. Just the way he’d ordered it.

“Y’know…” he muttered. Her vision was swimming, glitched. Was he raising an eyebrow at her condition, or was the gold turning to liquid? “You making these faces for me, that used to be the stuff of my wet dreams. But now that I’m actually seeing ‘em…?”

His gaze flicked to hers, sudden-like. She had enough time to register that he’d painted his nails for the occasion—rust-red—a real romantic—before his palm struck her cheek hard enough for her to see stars. Her own fluids spattered across her face. Pearl streaked through with the black stuff. All over her body, now, she realised. Everywhere his hands and mouth had touched. The mark of the other side, of Him, stamped all over her skin.

Metallic bitterness flooded her mouth as he stuffed his fingers between those lips instead. “Taste that?” She did—the taste of blood and acid and herself, but changed. Corrupted. “I cracked your cunt open so fucking easy, makes me wonder why I didn’t try this sooner.”

Rocking back on his knees for the last time, Higgs reached down and unbuckled. Tears were pouring down her face now, not just the allergenic kind, but real tears, salty with desire and fear. Fragile looked away, finding an anchor up in the stony drip of the cave ceiling. Where heaven was once rumoured to be, and a great many number of gods. She wasn’t sure about that anymore. Maybe there was only one, after all.

Or maybe none.

“Look at me.”

She did, but not at his face. Chiral impotence, maybe, or was he barely alive these days?

“You’re not… you’re not even hard,” she whispered. And despite herself, it turned into a sob. What was the point? Why was he doing this? And why did it make her feel hollow?

He grabbed a fistful of her hair, dragging her head up to his lap. “That’s your problem to fix, sweetheart. Even think about using those teeth, though, and I’ll knock ‘em down your throat.”

He wouldn’t, of course. He’d promised not to mess it up, her _pretty face_ , even if he left the rest of her in pieces. But still… she was malleable and uncomplaining as she let him guide her mouth around his soft cock, her hands hanging useless by her side.

He really was full of it. The black stuff. The gunk. He pumped into her face until she choked on it and he was at least half-hard, and then he pulled her head away and shoved it into the ground once again.

He said something like “here we go,” almost to himself. She was barely listening.

Using her ruined leg as leverage, he crammed into the space he’d carved out for himself inside of her. But he was rushing now. There was a quiet urgency to it all, from the first wince of his entrance, through each graceless and bruising thrust against her hips. Her brain drifted away, fragmented into flashes of black and gold. For a minute, there was nothing left—nothing but him, hollowing her out and filling her up again with something that tasted like the end, like death, like a ceaseless hunger that made her want to hold him and subsume him if only her arms weren’t broken.

Then all so quickly it was over: a jerk, an ugly sob, and his face spasmed and crumpled. He collapsed on the sticky mess he’d made of her, their bodies flat-packed together as his breath rang in her ear. She’d never forget the pattern of it. Nor the smell of his cum. If you could even call it that.

Silence fell when he finally rolled off of her and they lay side by side, something so fragile it would have shattered at a mere whisper. Just as well, then, that neither of them did, though the same tears that ran down her face ran down his, too.

A chiral caricature, nothing more.

After watching the blinking glow of the BB pod for a few minutes, Fragile turned her neck and broke the exhausted lull that had fallen between them.

“Will you tell me one thing?” Even her voice cracked.

“Maybe.” Higgs blinked away an inky tear.

“If I’d taken the goods… was there some catch with that, too?”

He exhaled deep and scratched his nose. “Nah,” he said. He sounded husky and tired. Bored, almost. “That one was real.”

Fragile rolled the answer in her mouth, testing its sharp bitterness. After a moment, she asked the second question. She couldn’t have truly said why. “Would you have been disappointed?”

He never answered. He’d only agreed to tell her one thing, after all.

The timefall had never let up, either, but began to hammer down in earnest by the time she felt the sweat cooling on her skin, the oily residue of his conquest stagnating in the hush. He’d be gone soon, but for now, he was everywhere, permeating her existence. Particles of him would linger in her like shrapnel.

Soon enough, he got to his feet and began to put himself back together, picking up the pieces of his image that both marked him out and ensured his anonymity. She had nothing like that left. He’d taken it all and then some.

Higgs put a finger to his lips. A vivid crack of lightning in the world outside rendered him a cave painting for a fraction of a moment, then returned his colours. “Hush, now, darlin’. We might have had fun, but you certainly won’t if _they_ get a hold of you.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but in a second, Higgs was gone, leaving behind a crackle of energy, the tang of chiralium, dust, nothing.

And Fragile, alone and naked as the timefall pounded down.

Quickly enough, she felt her skin prickle and turn red, that preternatural instinct to run or jump flooding her senses. But she couldn’t, still. The rash burned over her, leaving the parts of him he’d marked, black and blue and white. Colours of death. But she wasn’t dead yet.

She held her breath.


End file.
